The Reign of Arthur

by Christopher Gidlow

  Someone led the Britons to victory at Badon. Aside from Bede’s speculation, no other name has ever been applied to the victor. If Arthur was not his name, we have to accept that an Arthur who did not lead the Britons, nor found a dynasty, give his name to a prominent place nor have anything else to distinguish him, somehow supplanted the real victor in the memory of all British peoples. Frankly, it stretches credulity to the limit to believe that the victor of Mount Badon was not Arthur.

  THREE

  Historia Brittonum paints a picture of Arthur, warleader in the campaigns culminating in the battle of Mount Badon, which is consistent with known sources and not obviously influenced by legendary or dynastic considerations. Although composed in the early ninth century, it clearly draws on earlier sources. So far, we have seen nothing in it to predispose us to reject its information. Some historians and archaeologists consistently reject all of Historia Brittonum as late and inadmissible. Most, though, while rejecting the Arthur material, are happy to mine the rest for names and dates to suit their purposes.

  An example can be found in The English Settlements, the volume of the Oxford History of England covering this period. ‘There are just enough casual references in later Welsh Legend . . . to suggest that a man with this [name] may have won repute at some ill-defined point of time and place during the struggle. But if we add anything to the bare statement that Arthur may have lived and fought the Saxons, we pass at once from history to romance’ (Myres 1986).

  Contrast this with Myres’ treatment of another figure from the Historia, Soemil. All we know of him comes from the Historia, where we are told he was the ancestor of the Northumbrian king killed at Meicen and ‘first separated Deira from Bernicia’. Yet Myres is happy to write: ‘He could therefore have been a prominent figure among the Yorkshire Laeti in the early years of the fifth century. It looks as if he was remembered for the leading part he played in making his people independent of whatever sub-Roman authority had succeeded to the military command once held by the Dux Britanniarum in the northern frontier lands that were eventually to become Bernicia’ (Myres 1986).

  This is clearly every bit as speculative as saying that Arthur was a late fifth- or early sixth-century British leader who led the Britons to victory at Badon Hill, and has far less evidence to support it. Although Myres cites Gildas as one reason for rejecting Arthur, his main prejudice is summed up in the word ‘romance’. There is nothing romantic or legendary about the Historia’s treatment of Arthur, and the fact that medieval writers embellished the story is no reason to reject it.

  While the Harleian Recension is the earliest reference to Arthur’s battles, it does not stand in isolation. The later recensions add new information and clarify, as far as their authors understand it, some difficulties in ‘Nennius’s’ text.

  The Vatican Recension has been through two processes separating it from the Harleian (Dumville 1985). An English writer in the mid-tenth century brought the synchronisms up to the date of the fifth year of the reign of King Edmund of the English. Some time before this, between 830 and 944 (Dumville estimates between 875 and 925) the text was updated by a Welsh scribe. His home region becomes clearer when we examine his version of the Historia’s list of twenty-eight cities. The new scribe misread XXVIII as XXXIII, and had to add five more cities. The ones he chose were Cair Guroc (Worcester?), Cair Merdin (Carmarthen), Cair Ceri (Cirencester), Cair Gloiu (Gloucester) and Cair Teim (Llandaff), clearly signalling his interest in South Wales and adjoining England.

  This writer added glosses, giving the Welsh names of some of Arthur’s battles. According to him, urbs leogis (sic) was in British Cair Lion. In the list of cities, he uses this exact form to replace the Harleian’s ‘Cair Legeion Guar Usc’ – Caerleon. He is the only writer in all the recensions to locate this battle at Caerleon rather than Chester, and it is likely that the similarly named city in his local area caused him to make this addition rather than real knowledge of where the battle was fought.

  The battle of Tribuit is glossed as ‘Which we call Traht Treuroit’. If this, too, is familiar to a South Welsh writer, it seems likely that it originally came to Nennius from his South Welsh source, rather than the north-eastern or Kentish ones. If it was actually in South Wales, we would expect the place-name to exist still. Logically, therefore, Tribuit was in an adjacent area which has since become English-speaking: the lower Severn Valley of Gloucestershire, which Nennius knew as the country of the Hwicce, or Herefordshire, which includes some of what was Ercing.

  The eleventh battle is more intriguing. Where the Harleian listed the battle of Mount Agned, the Vatican has: ‘The eleventh battle was on the mountain called Breguoin where they [the Saxons] were put to flight, which we call Cat Bregion [Battle of Bregion in Welsh].’ Another recension, the Gildasian, provides the link in the development. It simply glosses the battle of Mount Agned as ‘that is ‘Cat Bregomion’ [the battle of Bregomion in Welsh].

  Breguoin/Bregomion could have several explanations:

  1. Mount Agned is the English version of the battle the Welsh call Bregomion.

  2. The writers did not know where Mount Agned was, but they did know that Arthur fought the Saxons at Bregomion and equated it with Mons Agned. Mons Agned could then be either an English name or a now lost Welsh name.

  3. The writers did not know anything about Mons Agned, but to keep the number of battles up to twelve they inserted a famous battle of Urien Rheged, which a poem about him calls Brewyn.

  Perversely, this last suggestion is the one most favoured by scholars. Quite why a writer who did not know where Agned was did not just leave it in the current text is baffling. No other unknown places in the text have been replaced in this way. If the writer wanted, for whatever reason, to mention one of Urien Rheged’s battles, he had a perfect place to put it: in the part of the Historia where Urien himself appears.

  This option is plainly far-fetched, given that there is no indication in either of the recensions that the writers knew anything different about Urien Rheged than the original author did. It is often suggested that Brewyn or Bregomion is Bremenium, the northern Roman fort of High Rochester. A battle at this location, in the north-east, not far from the Caledonian wood or the Northumbrian River Glen, is in one of the areas we would expect. However, it is difficult to see why a South Welsh writer should use the name of this battle to replace that of Mount Agned.

  The only place around the South Wales area which might give rise to a battle of Bregomion is Branogenium, now Leintwardine in Herefordshire. On the borders of Ercing, this would be within what we have already established as a key area for the survival of Arthurian traditions. There is nowhere in the area which preserves the name Mount Agned, leaving the question of why one name replaces the other unanswered.

  Arthur Dux

  Instead of the introduction with which we are familiar from the Harleian, the Vatican begins straight after St Germanus with the arrival of Octha from the north to establish the Kingdom of Kent. ‘Then warlike Arthur, with the soldiers of Britain and the kings, fought against them. And, although many were more noble than him, he was twelve times Dux Belli [warleader] and victor in the battles [the list of twelve battles follows] . . . but as much as the Saxons were laid low in the battles, so they were reinforced continually from Germany and by other Saxons, and they invited kings and duces with many soldiers from nearly all provinces to come to them. And this was done up to the time when Ida reigned.’

  The writer clarifies what he sees as the original intended meaning, that Arthur was not himself one of the ‘kings of the Britons’. Furthermore, he makes it explicit that Arthur is lower in rank and that his position as Dux Belli was informal. The Harleian uses the plural form Dux Bellorum (Leader of Battles). The slightly altered title Dux Belli is used by Bede of St Germanus.

  The understanding that Arthur was not a king did not survive beyond the tenth century. Later sources were determined that Arthur had been a king. We will examine ranks and titles later, but for
the moment we should note that it is far from clear what constituted a ‘proper’ king in early Dark Age Britain. Gildas calls the leaders of his time tyrants, kings, judges, governors and leaders (Duces, the plural of Dux). The rulers themselves use a variety of titles. Vortiporius appears on his memorial stone as ‘Protector’. One of the leaders in Y Gododdin, Uruei, has the title ‘Ut Eidin’ (Judge of Eidin), derived from the word Iudex which Gildas uses. The poet tells us that ‘his father was no Guledic’. That is the title the Historia knew for Ambrosius, in Latin ‘King among all the kings of the British nation’. Either Uruei’s father is not as high up as a Guledic, or Urei had not inherited his position.

  It is conceivable that Arthur may have borne a royal title. The Annales often leave out the titles, whether bishop or king, of the characters referred to. Pantha, slain c. 657, can only be recognised as ‘King Penda’ of the Mercians from Bede, or the Historia’s notice that he ‘reigned for ten years’. Cadwallon is called King in only one of his three entries. He is never given a title in his praise-poem. We could also speculate that Arthur was not a king at the time of his victories, but became one subsequently, perhaps as a result of them.

  It is possible that the inference that Arthur Dux is not a king is brought to the battle-list by the Vatican redactor or even by the original author, misreading his source. While Gildas used dux and rex as synonyms, by the ninth century, they had become distinct. An original description of Arthur as the leader of the (other) British kings in battle could have been misunderstood as assigning a particular and lower rank to him.

  Discussion on the subject of Arthur’s rank in the Historia has been clouded by the idea that the work is a mélange of different sources, each using its own terminology. If, on the contrary, the battle-list only achieved its current form when Nennius combined Arthurian material from various sources, it is legitimate to compare the language used in it with that in the rest of the Historia.

  Nennius uses titles in a systematic way. The Roman emperors are Caesars, emperors or consuls, usurping emperors are tyrants. The principal rulers of Britain are reges, ‘kings’, and their junior colleagues are reguli, ‘minor kings’ (HB 22). He is also aware of Iudex ‘Judge’ as a synonym for king: (HB 8) when iudices or reges are spoken of, people say ‘he judged Britain with its three islands’. Dux and its plural duces mean only one thing to Nennius – generals or governors subordinate to the Roman emperors (HB 28). ‘The Romans did not dare to come to Britain because the Britons had killed their duces’ (HB 30). ‘The duces of the Romans were killed three times by the Britons.’ ‘The Romans had come to Britain with a great army, established the emperor with his duces.’ ‘The duces of the Romans were killed by the Britons – three times.’ That is the only sense of the word which Nennius uses. He makes the distinction absolutely clear in chapter 24, which seems to be related to the Kentish material. In this, Karitius becomes ‘Emperor and tyrant’ by killing Severus with ‘all the duces of the Roman people . . . and struck down all the reguli of Britain’. This shows us that when Nennius writes that Arthur is a dux, he means something specific. His use of the word dux contrasts the nature and status of Arthur’s power with the reges Brittonum, the kings of the Britons. He is in some sense acting as a Roman general or governor.

  Historians have tried to fit Arthur into the framework of late Roman government. Some of the words used by Gildas and the Historia were technical terms in the Roman administration. The offices most cited in connection with Arthur are military ones. The Comes Britanniarum was the commander of the mobile, mainly cavalry, forces. The title Comes was never used of Arthur, and the idea that he was a cavalry leader owes more to medieval romances than to contemporary evidence. The Dux Britanniarum – Leader of the Britains, has a title tantalisingly similar to Dux Bellorum (Leader of Battles) which the Historia gives to Arthur. There is no reason, however, to think that Dux Bellorum is a misremembered Roman title. Comparable Welsh titles Llywiaudir llawur (Battle Ruler) and Tywyssawc Cat (Battle Leader) are used in early poems. The first is used of Arthur himself, in conjunction with ‘Emperor’.

  The phrase ‘then Arthur fought against them in those days, with the kings of the Britons’, in the context of the Vatican Recension, is used to mean that he is not one of those kings. The writer says this specifically, and reinforces it with the connection between the kings and duces of the Saxons. The Vatican Recension also clears up the possible inference that Arthur is a superman, by adding the milites, the soldiers, to the British forces. As a man from South Wales, the writer might be influenced by the local description of Arthur (in the Mirabilia) as miles (singular of milites) – the soldier.

  Although it is most plausible that Nennius intended us to understand that Arthur held a different type of rank to the kings, there is another possible reading. By writing that Arthur fought the Saxons ‘with the Kings of the Britons’, Nennius may have meant that Arthur was not himself a Briton. The first historical character known to have borne the name Arthur is the son of the Irish/Scottish King of Dalriada Aedan mac Gabran, mentioned in a book written c. 700. It was common practice for the late Romans to employ barbarians as military commanders.

  Dumville comments rather unfairly that the Vatican’s Welsh editor ‘had access to Welsh legend’, to make his amendments. There is no Welsh legend about Traht Treuroit or Cat Breguoin, or about Arthur being a less than royal elected warleader. We might rather say that the writer had access to Welsh historical material focusing particularly on his area of interest, South Wales and the lower Severn.

  These issues will have to remain unresolved for the time being, while we turn to the next Dark Age references to Arthur, in Annales Cambriae.

  Annals of Wales

  A later British source, the so-called Annales Cambriae or Annals of Wales, is nearly always treated in conjunction with Historia Brittonum. This is because the earliest surviving versions of both happen to be found in the same manuscript, Harleian 3859. The two texts are not related, in that the authors of each did not use or even seem to know of the other. There are some thirty-six later versions of the Historia and two of the Annales, but these are always found separately. In the period we are covering, they have only one incident in common. Both report Arthur fighting at the battle of Badon.

  The Annales are simple in form. They are a sequence of years, each marked with the abbreviation an, for Latin annus, ‘year’. Every tenth year is marked with a roman numeral, counting from year 1 at the beginning of the cycle. The basic framework is found in Irish manuscripts, and probably has its origin in a system for calculating Easter. Most years are blank, but occasionally some memorable event is listed. Annales Cambriae take the Irish entries, but add events from British history. The end result is a sequence of ‘dated’ historical events which, in published form, look deceptively similar to the Anglo-Saxon Chronicle. We will examine their structure in a moment, but first let us look specifically at what the Annales say about Arthur.

  ‘The battle of Badon, in which Arthur carried the cross of our Lord Jesus Christ for three days and three nights on his shoulders, and the Britons were the victors.’ Arthur is the only named participant, so presumably, as in the Historia, he was the victorious commander. Here we have an independent source stating that Arthur was at Badon. It seems unlikely that both the Annales and the Historia arbitrarily decided to link the name of the same famous battle to the same legendary Welsh folk hero.

  The only alternative to each source independently recording the same tradition is that they are not independent, specifically that the later Annales have been influenced by the Historia. The scribe who copied both texts around 1100 is often said to have expanded a terse reference to Badon to include the legendary figure of Arthur. If so, it is odd that he did not use material from the Historia he had just copied. In other early twelfth-century material, Arthur was seen as a foil of the saints, making it strange the scribe invented him carrying the cross of Christ.

  Even if he had wanted to, it is doubtful how co
mpetent the scribe would have been inventing an Annales entry. In the entry relating to Gabran, son of Dungart, he mechanically transcribed ‘an. Gabr. an. filius Dungart moritur’, as if there was a year characterised by a meaningless ‘Gabr’ followed by one in which an anonymous son of Dungart died. All the evidence is that he is faithfully transcribing a mid-tenth-century document with no regard to the content. His exemplar must therefore have already included this reference to Arthur.

  In the unlikely event that the reference to Badon has been contaminated, the Annales give an independent witness to one of Arthur’s other battles. Twenty-one years after Badon, we read: ‘Gueith Camlann in which Arthur and Medraut were slain and there was a plague in Britain and Ireland.’ Gueith is a Welsh word meaning strife, used elsewhere in the Annales in the names of battles: the battle of Chester is ‘Gueith Cair Legion’. Perhaps this indicates Camlann was from a Welsh source and Badon from a Latin one. Medieval versions of the story were unanimous that Medraut was Arthur’s adversary in this battle. ‘Modred’, the name by which he is better known, is possibly derived from a Breton or Cornish version. That they are indeed opponents seems the most sensible inference here.